Tag: Terry Funk

Welcome everyone to another installment of WCW Monday Nitro from the year 2000. We start things off with a recap of what happened last week in WCW. I actually watched last week’s Nitro but still found this rapidfire recap to be so overstuffed with shit that I was confused about what I was looking at (I don’t think it helped that they had Thunder stuff as well).

I’m not against this recap thing in theory since any particular episode of Nitro could be someone’s first wrestling show, but in order to make it a more effective thing, maybe cut some of the less important stuff from the opening recap package, but I digress…

So this past week I discovered an excellent podcast titled Keep It 2000 and binge-listened to all 25 episodes that currently exist. The show reviews episodes of WCW Monday Nitro from the year 2000 and is so utterly hilarious that I decided to start playing along at home and jump on with the episode they will cover in the next installment of their podcast. This is that episode.

We’re at some arena in Cincinnati, Ohio for the first WCW PPV of 2000, Souled Out after some fireworks and screaming maniacs with signs are shown we join our broadcast team for the evening: Tony Schiavone, Professor Iron “Mike” Tenay, and Bobby “The Brain” Heenan.

We’re live at the American Airlines Arena in Miami for WCW Uncensored, a show with a reputation of one of the worst WCW PPVs of all times. So why exactly am I reviewing a notoriously bad show from WCW’s nadir? BECAUSE DOUBLE STRAPIFICATION JACK!

We start things off with a video package highlighting the events leading up to the trio of main events to come. We get stuff about Luger and Sting feuding for the nine billionth time and Sid and Jarrett jostling for the World Heavyweight Championship, but none of that shit actually matters because Hogan vs. Flair is a MOTHERFUCKIN’ YAPAPI STRAP MATCH BROTHER DUDE JACK!

I guess this really should be called ECW Friends With Benefits or something since this is the second One Night Stand PPV. The show begins in true ECW fashion with a cold open. We see the rabid ECW fans packed to the rafters in the Hammerstein Ballroom chanting “ECW!” until the ECW theme song hits and Paul Heyman makes his way out to the ring to a huge pop.

Heyman thanks all the fans for being and says that with its rebirth ECW would appeal to a new, global audience. He hypes up the upcoming ECW show on Sci-Fi and tells the fans that it was because of them demanding it that ECW is coming back.

He thanks them again and tells them that ECW is going to be better than Raw or Smackdown. Oh Paul Heyman, how wrong you’d end up being, but that’s another story for another time…

The opening is a little different than the Saturday Night’s Main Event openings we’re used to since it’s pretty much just Mean Gene doing voiceovers about the card as we see the various combatants rather than the traditional promos of yore. We do get a couple soundbites from the wrestlers though. Adrian Adonis, for example, gets a couple seconds to talk about how he “always wanted” Paul Orndorff.

We get a cold open of Jerry Lawler going into Sable’s dressing room. He wants to know what kind of bikini she’s going to wear for the bikini contest. She tells him that a picture is worth a thousand words or something and offers to show him.

Sable goes behind one of those dressing screens and strips off her top and tosses it out to Lawler and then invites him behind the screen for a peak. Jerry Lawler basically has an aneurysm.

We then get a hype video for the show talking about the shit going on with Taker and Austin and wondering if they can coexist tonight when they face Kane and Mankind for the tag team titles. It’s not one of the better hype videos WWE has done, but for an In Your House PPV I guess it suffices.

Welcome everyone to WWF Shotgun Saturday Night! It’s 1998 so it’s no longer that weird WWF show that seemed to be aping the aesthetic style of ECW and having matches with midgets and shit. Now it’s just a b-show for midcarders. Our announcers for the evening are Kevin Kelly and Michael Cole, and Christ on a crutch are they terrible. Hopefully the in ring action isn’t that bad.

We start with highlights from Stone Cold regaining the WWF Championship from Kane last week before the show’s opening plays. We go then to the arena where Jim Ross welcomes us to Raw as pyro explodes and fans go apeshit. Right out of the gate Ross is yelling about Austin being in the building tonight.

Recorded on December 19, 1985 at the Sun Dome in Tampa, the fourth installment of Saturday Night’s Main Event aired on January 4 of the following year. As is the case with all of these shows we start with some random promos before the actual event gets underway.